Behind every cloud service or cloud-based solution, there are real people...A robust ecosystem of solutions providers has emerged around cloud computing. But who are the CEOs & CTOs behind those providers, who are the internal and external entrepreneurs driving companies involved in the Cloud, who are the leading engineers, developers, analysts, researchers, marketing professionals, authors...who, in short, are the people behind the cloud?

This list will be updated weekly between now and November 4-7, 2013, when 13th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley opens its doors in the Santa Clara Convention Center, in the heart of California's Silicon Valley. Here are some highly prominent "Cloud People" to kick off with...RANDY BIAS | @randybias

"Randy Bias is visionary. He sees things others don't." [Emphasis added.] That is how Mårten Mickos puts it, as succinctly as ever. One of the things Randy saw, long before others, was the Cloud itself. He founded Cloudscaling as long ago 2006, with himself as as Co-Founder, CTO and Chairman. While it wasn't till 2011 that the company got a Series A investment of $4M, the plain fact is that Cloudscaling, and most especially Cloudscaling's founder, was leading the charge toward infrastructure elasticity almost earlier than anyone else.

A vocal open systems advocate for more than two decades, before Cloudscaling Randy was the technical visionary at GoGrid and at CloudScale Networks. He led the open-licensing of GoGrid's APIs, which inspired Sun Microsystems, Rackspace Cloud, VMware and others to follow.

He was also an early and vocal supporter of the OpenStack project, and led the teams that deployed the first public OpenStack storage cloud (Swift) outside of Rackspace, and the first public OpenStack compute cloud (Nova). He is a founding Board Member of the OpenStack Foundation. He also popularized the cloud server "pets vs. cattle" meme.

The OpenStack Foundation promotes the development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud operating system. As the independent home for OpenStack, the Foundation has already attracted more than 7,000 individual members from 100 countries and 850 different organizations, secured more than $10 million in funding and is ready to fulfill the OpenStack mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform.

Previously Jonathan was a founder of The Rackspace Cloud. He started his career working as a web developer for Rackspace, and during his tenure, he and co-worker Todd Morey had a vision to build a sophisticated web hosting environment where users and businesses alike could turn to design, develop and deploy their ideal web site – all without being responsible for procuring the technology, installing it or making sure it is built to be always available. This vision became The Rackspace Cloud. Since then he has been a major driver of OpenStack, the open source cloud software initiative.REUVEN COHEN | @rUv

Reuven Cohen is (still) young, yet Reuven Cohen has been part of the Cloud Computing vanguard from the very beginning.

Pictured below talking to me on SYS-CON.TV at the first ever Cloud Expo, in November 2008, Ruv founded Enomaly in Canada in 2004, to exploit the same concept - "elastic computing" that Amazon so famously exploited when it launched EC2 (its Elastic Compute Cloud) in August 2006. Enomaly was among the first to develop a self-service infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform circa 2005, as well as SpotCloud (2011), the first commodity style cloud computing Spot Market. In December 2011 Enomaly was acquired by Virtustream, where Ruv acted as Sr. Vice President of Community Clouds until August 2013, when he was appointed by Citrix to the newly created role of Chief Cloud Advocate.

He writes "The Digital Provocateur column for Forbes Magazine, is the co-founder with DAVE NIELSEN of CloudCamp (300+ Cities around the Globe), an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas and is the largest of the ‘barcamp’ style of events. He is also the co-host of the DigitalNibbles Podcast sponsored by Intel. He has served as a board member to the Information Technology Association of Canada as well as a strategic adviser to Sun Microsystems, Amazon, York University, The Government of Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs & International Trade (DFAIT).

Ruv is currently very active in International trade as a liaison with various governments helping define IT policy, definitions (NIST) and agendas. Some of his recent participation include the governments of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Brasil, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Taiwan, and China

Bernard is VP of Enterprise Solutions at Enstratius. At Enstratius, he works with enterprises throughout the world to help them achieve greater agility and improved IT economics. His work with enterprises includes opportunity evaluation, best practices recommendations, economic analysis, and process streamlining. Bernard was previously CEO of HyperStratus, a Silicon Valley cloud consulting firm helping its clients plan, design, and implement cloud initiatives. HyperStratus clients included the KT (Korea Telecom), Chunghwa Telecom, Trend Micro, and Pepsi.

He is the author or co-author of three books on virtualization and cloud computing, including Virtualization for Dummies, the most popular book on the subject ever published.

MÅRTEN MICKOS | @martenmickosDescribing himself succinctly on his Twitter account as a "Finn in Silicon Valley", Mårten Mickos is CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. According to no less an authority than BusinessWeek, he "has a track record of building global disruptive businesses."

No surprise then to find Mårten right at the heart of the Cloud. He joined Eucalyptus, purveyor of private AWS-compatible clouds, as CEO in March 2010, having from 2001-8 been CEO of open source database maker MySQL AB, which was famously bought by Sun in 2008 for $1 billion. In September 2009 he become Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital, and anyone who understands how VC works in the Valley should have noted that, when he left Benchmark to take up the chief executive office at a Cloud company...that confirmed that Cloud Computing was certain to become huge.

One of five cloudsters who put on the first ever CloudCamp - the other four being Sam Charrington, Jesse Silver, Sara Dornsife and REUVEN COHEN - Dave Nielsen has done for "unconferences" what Wordsworth did for daffodils: put them on the map.

Several of the five had experience with the Open Spaceunconference format which had been around since the early 80s and it seemed to them like a good fit for the then still emergent phenomenon known as Cloud Computing. The first CloudCamp, accordingly, was held June 2008 in San Francisco. The aim then as now was to provide a common ground for the introduction and advancement of cloud computing. The agenda at a CloudCamp is never completely set until the attendees arrive and set it.

Since a participant-driven unconference like this can not only run on its own but also within a larger conference, Cloud Expo invited Dave to run a CloudCamp @ Cloud Expo for the first time in 2009 and there has been one held at every Cloud Expo since.

Mark Skilton is a Global Director, Strategy Office, Capgemini Infrastructure Services. He is the Technical Leader for the Group Government Cloud Portfolio and is the author of the "Cloud Computing Education" and "Infrastructure Strategy" Courses at the Capgemini University. He is also Co-Chair of the Cloud Computing Work Group at The Open Group, an International Standards Body. SMark has spoken and published internationally on the subject of Cloud Computing, and spoke at 11th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley on the subject of "Maximizing Business Value in a Cloud Enabled Ecosystem."

Founder of the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group (SVCCG) and of Scalr. The SVCCG was founded Sep 11, 2007, by Chief Organizer Stadil and Assistant Organizer Ferhat Hatay. As of this writing it has 8,697 members and counting, and has held 104 meetups.

Sebastian has been a Cloud developer since 2004, starting with web services for e-commerce and then for computational resources. He founded Scalr, a software-project-turned-startup that scales website infrastructure automagically. Scalr's CTO is Igor Savchenko and Marat Komarov its Director of Engineering. Ever thoughtful and prescient, his Master's Thesis at the Ecole supérieure de Commerce de Lille in France was on "Signal Oriented Marketing: establishing trust among mutually distrustful parties using insights from Evolutionary Biology and Game Theory."

Vice-President & CTO at Amazon, Werner Vogels - who keynoted the very first Cloud Expo and indeed the second one too - is responsible at Amazon for driving the company’s technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon’s customers at a global scale.

Prior to joining Amazon, Werner worked as a researcher at the Computer Science Department at Cornell University where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that target the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems. He holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles for journals and conferences, most of them on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.

Jeremy Geelan is Chairman & CEO of the 21st Century Internet Group, Inc. and an Executive Academy Member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Formerly he was President & COO at Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences across six continents. You can follow him on twitter: @jg21.

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.

Please wait while we process your request...

Your feedback has been submitted for approval.

Most Recent Comments

japersonal07/21/13 12:55:00 PM EDT

Would be interesting to see here people from medium-size cloud hosting companies.

What they've done so far is open up part of their API to the public, while keeping more of it for themselves. I expect it's only a matter of time before they start opening up the rest to paying customers, who will get their own secret key, linked to a site's domain, which can be retrieved through the HTTP Referer header.

The signature would act much like an API key does today, except that by combining a secret with a product of the chart's arguments, the signature will vary for each individual chart, and Google can trust that the person who generated it is a genuine customer, and that it hasn't been modified along the way. It would no longer be possible to simply copy an API key and fake an IP and Referrer value, it would still require something extra, which only Google and its customer would know.

For IoT to grow as quickly as analyst firms’ project, a lot is going to fall on developers to quickly bring applications to market. But the lack of a standard development platform threatens to slow growth and make application development more time consuming and costly, much like we’ve seen in the mobile space.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mike Weiner, Product Manager of the Omega DevCloud with KORE Telematics Inc., discussed the evolving requirements for developers as IoT matures and conducted a live demonstration of how quickly application development can happen when the need to comply wit...

SYS-CON Events announced today that HPM Networks will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
For 20 years, HPM Networks has been integrating technology solutions that solve complex business challenges. HPM Networks has designed solutions for both SMB and enterprise customers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Internet of Everything (IoE) brings together people, process, data and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before – transforming information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. IoE creates new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented opportunities to improve business and government operations, decision making and mission support capabilities.

Explosive growth in connected devices. Enormous amounts of data for collection and analysis. Critical use of data for split-second decision making and actionable information. All three are factors in making the Internet of Things a reality. Yet, any one factor would have an IT organization pondering its infrastructure strategy.
How should your organization enhance its IT framework to enable an Internet of Things implementation? In his session at @ThingsExpo, James Kirkland, Red Hat's Chief Architect for the Internet of Things and Intelligent Systems, described how to revolutionize your archit...

MuleSoft has announced the findings of its 2015 Connectivity Benchmark Report on the adoption and business impact of APIs.
The findings suggest traditional businesses are quickly evolving into "composable enterprises" built out of hundreds of connected software services, applications and devices. Most are embracing the Internet of Things (IoT) and microservices technologies like Docker. A majority are integrating wearables, like smart watches, and more than half plan to generate revenue with APIs within the next year.

Growth hacking is common for startups to make unheard-of progress in building their business. Career Hacks can help Geek Girls and those who support them (yes, that's you too, Dad!) to excel in this typically male-dominated world.
Get ready to learn the facts:
Is there a bias against women in the tech / developer communities?
Why are women 50% of the workforce, but hold only 24% of the STEM or IT positions?
Some beginnings of what to do about it!
In her Opening Keynote at 16th Cloud Expo, Sandy Carter, IBM General Manager Cloud Ecosystem and Developers, and a Social Business Evangelist, d...

In his keynote at 16th Cloud Expo, Rodney Rogers, CEO of Virtustream, discussed the evolution of the company from inception to its recent acquisition by EMC – including personal insights, lessons learned (and some WTF moments) along the way. Learn how Virtustream’s unique approach of combining the economics and elasticity of the consumer cloud model with proper performance, application automation and security into a platform became a breakout success with enterprise customers and a natural fit for the EMC Federation.

The Internet of Things is not only adding billions of sensors and billions of terabytes to the Internet. It is also forcing a fundamental change in the way we envision Information Technology. For the first time, more data is being created by devices at the edge of the Internet rather than from centralized systems. What does this mean for today's IT professional?
In this Power Panel at @ThingsExpo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists addressed this very serious issue of profound change in the industry.

Discussions about cloud computing are evolving into discussions about enterprise IT in general. As enterprises increasingly migrate toward their own unique clouds, new issues such as the use of containers and microservices emerge to keep things interesting.
In this Power Panel at 16th Cloud Expo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists addressed the state of cloud computing today, and what enterprise IT professionals need to know about how the latest topics and trends affect their organization.

It is one thing to build single industrial IoT applications, but what will it take to build the Smart Cities and truly society-changing applications of the future? The technology won’t be the problem, it will be the number of parties that need to work together and be aligned in their motivation to succeed.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jason Mondanaro, Director, Product Management at Metanga, discussed how you can plan to cooperate, partner, and form lasting all-star teams to change the world and it starts with business models and monetization strategies.

Converging digital disruptions is creating a major sea change - Cisco calls this the Internet of Everything (IoE). IoE is the network connection of People, Process, Data and Things, fueled by Cloud, Mobile, Social, Analytics and Security, and it represents a $19Trillion value-at-stake over the next 10 years.
In her keynote at @ThingsExpo, Manjula Talreja, VP of Cisco Consulting Services, discussed IoE and the enormous opportunities it provides to public and private firms alike. She will share what businesses must do to thrive in the IoE economy, citing examples from several industry sectors.

There will be 150 billion connected devices by 2020. New digital businesses have already disrupted value chains across every industry. APIs are at the center of the digital business. You need to understand what assets you have that can be exposed digitally, what their digital value chain is, and how to create an effective business model around that value chain to compete in this economy. No enterprise can be complacent and not engage in the digital economy. Learn how to be the disruptor and not the disruptee.

Akana has released Envision, an enhanced API analytics platform that helps enterprises mine critical insights across their digital eco-systems, understand their customers and partners and offer value-added personalized services.
“In today’s digital economy, data-driven insights are proving to be a key differentiator for businesses. Understanding the data that is being tunneled through their APIs and how it can be used to optimize their business and operations is of paramount importance,” said Alistair Farquharson, CTO of Akana.

Business as usual for IT is evolving into a "Make or Buy" decision on a service-by-service conversation with input from the LOBs. How does your organization move forward with cloud? In his general session at 16th Cloud Expo, Paul Maravei, Regional Sales Manager, Hybrid Cloud and Managed Services at Cisco, discusses how Cisco and its partners offer a market-leading portfolio and ecosystem of cloud infrastructure and application services that allow you to uniquely and securely combine cloud business applications and services across multiple cloud delivery models.

The enterprise market will drive IoT device adoption over the next five years.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, John Greenough, an analyst at BI Intelligence, division of Business Insider, analyzed how companies will adopt IoT products and the associated cost of adopting those products.
John Greenough is the lead analyst covering the Internet of Things for BI Intelligence- Business Insider’s paid research service. Numerous IoT companies have cited his analysis of the IoT. Prior to joining BI Intelligence, he worked analyzing bank technology for Corporate Insight and The Clearing House Payment...

"Optimal Design is a technology integration and product development firm that specializes in connecting devices to the cloud," stated Joe Wascow, Co-Founder & CMO of Optimal Design, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.

SYS-CON Events announced today that CommVault has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. A singular vision – a belief in a better way to address current and future data management needs – guides CommVault in the development of Singular Information Management® solutions for high-performance data protection, universal availability and simplified management of data on complex storage networks. CommVault's exclusive single-platform architecture gives companies unp...

Electric Cloud and Arynga have announced a product integration partnership that will bring Continuous Delivery solutions to the automotive Internet-of-Things (IoT) market. The joint solution will help automotive manufacturers, OEMs and system integrators adopt DevOps automation and Continuous Delivery practices that reduce software build and release cycle times within the complex and specific parameters of embedded and IoT software systems.

"ciqada is a combined platform of hardware modules and server products that lets people take their existing devices or new devices and lets them be accessible over the Internet for their users," noted Geoff Engelstein of ciqada, a division of Mars International, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.

Internet of Things is moving from being a hype to a reality. Experts estimate that internet connected cars will grow to 152 million, while over 100 million internet connected wireless light bulbs and lamps will be operational by 2020. These and many other intriguing statistics highlight the importance of Internet powered devices and how market penetration is going to multiply many times over in the next few years.

As a recent graduate, and now professor in the University of Connecticut's Business Analytics and Project Management masters program, I have a lot of conversations surrounding the topic of "Big Data" and questions such as, "What does that term actually mean?"
Big Data is a fairly new topic and what seems to be an elusive term for many. Conversations are important to help bring clarity to Big Data, as well as generate ideas about how we can shape, not only what it is, but also the future of where it's going.

In their session at DevOps Summit, Asaf Yigal, co-founder and the VP of Product at Logz.io, and Tomer Levy, co-founder and CEO of Logz.io, will explore the entire process that they have undergone – through research, benchmarking, implementation, optimization, and customer success – in developing a processing engine that can handle petabytes of data.
They will also discuss the requirements of such an engine in terms of scalability, resilience, security, and availability along with how the architecture accomplishes these requirements.
Lastly, they will review the gory details of the technolo...

The multi-trillion economic opportunity around the "Internet of Things" (IoT) is emerging as the hottest topic for investors in 2015. As we connect the physical world with information technology, data from actions, processes and the environment can increase sales, improve efficiencies, automate daily activities and minimize risk.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ed Maguire, Senior Analyst at CLSA Americas, will describe what is new and different about IoT, explore financial, technological and real-world impact across consumer and business use cases. Why now?
Significant corporate and venture...

Traditionally IT has been seen as a cost center with nothing but a cost associated with enabling, supporting and maintaining anything IT. IT on the other hand is an integral part of today’s enterprise that often does not have a replacement. IT can however be turned into a powerful profit center. IT can be empowered by giving it tools and mechanisms to enable chargebacks to work as an independent entity within an enterprise and offer services to its stakeholders. Powered by Solgenia’s revolutionary Cloud Monetization platform Powua, Enterprise IT can now create chargebacks to the granularity of...

It’s time to talk more vociferously about open data.
A better headline for this piece would be: why open data is not an overnight sensation or indeed a turn of a dial or a flick of a switch, i.e., it is not something automatically achieved without some kind of longer term strategic drive, which, in itself, typically needs to be driven by a defined longer term strategic need.

It’s not hard to feel sorry for Chief Information Officers (CIOs) – the levels at which they need to operate change all the time… and depth and granularity of the dataflows that present themselves change all the time.
Just when we thought we had the whole client-server model worked out, along came the Internet and cloud and the data center.

What if, during a snow emergency, an on-the-ground sensor could automatically trigger a relevant emergency notification related to snowfall and road impact. And then, after it’s triggered, that notification is delivered intelligently to individuals based on an extensive set of rules designed to alert the most available and capable responders.
This “what if” question about “smart highways” is short-sighted. We are already there, and we are only getting started. While mainstream attention is paid to machine-to-machine communications, new technologies are being developed to make these communica...

User expectations and rethinking of business productivity are having a profound impact on how business applications are used, designed, and leveraged to help buyers, sellers, and employees do their jobs better.

Big Data is the revolution the business world has been waiting for. The transformation that has taken place among many companies due to the adoption of Big Data analytics simply can’t be understated. Organizations of all types have looked into the many ways in which big data can help them change how they do things for the better, cultivating more success as businesses look to the future. For all the benefits that big data provides companies, the main goal is, of course, to make money. In fact, with all the capabilities that come from using big data, if a business isn’t utilizing it to make mon...

Snagajob – one of the largest hourly employment networks for job seekers and employers – uses big data to finally understand their systems' performance in action.
The next BriefingsDirect analytics innovation case study interview explores how Snagajob in Richmond, Virginia – one of the largest hourly employment networks for job seekers and employers – uses big data to finally understand their systems' performance in action. The result is vast improvement in how they provide rapid and richer services to their customers.

As organizations realize the scope of the Internet of Things, gaining key insights from Big Data, through the use of advanced analytics, becomes crucial. However, IoT also creates the need for petabyte scale storage of data from millions of devices. A new type of Storage is required which seamlessly integrates robust data analytics with massive scale. These storage systems will act as “smart systems” provide in-place analytics that speed discovery and enable businesses to quickly derive meaningful and actionable insights.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Paul Turner, Chief Marketing Officer at...

In the consumer IoT, everything is new, and the IT world of bits and bytes holds sway.
But industrial and commercial realms encompass operational technology (OT) that has been around for 25 or 50 years.
This grittier, pre-IP, more hands-on world has much to gain from Industrial IoT (IIoT) applications and principles.
But adding sensors and wireless connectivity won't work in environments that demand unwavering reliability and performance.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ron Sege, CEO of Echelon, discussed how as enterprise IT embraces other IoT-related technology trends, enterprises with in...

Tableau Software and big data analytics platforms come together to provide visualization benefits for those seeking more than just crunched numbers.
The next BriefingsDirect big data innovation discussion highlights how Tableau Software and big data analytics platforms come together to provide visualization benefits for those seeking more than just crunched numbers. They're looking for ways to improve their businesses effectively and productively, and to share the analysis quickly and broadly.

The concept behind the Internet of Things has been around for a while now, ATMs being some of the first enterprise, hardened, network-connected, managed devices for mainstream consumer use. So too with our mobile phones, these are not new concepts to network technicians or hardware geeks. But for the rest of us, we simply never imagined the extents that the "ubiquity of connectedness" would take all other industries, from biotech to automotive, personal care to agriculture, entertainment to custom manufacturing. The list is as long as our imaginations.

Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.